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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

You take an initial immigrant who gets in because of the merit categories and then have them bring over all their family members, whose gene pool ends up in the U.S? Whose family values?

This article is about upward mobility in the children of immigrants. What traits do children get from their parents? Most people would say it's nature (their genes) and nurture (their upbringing). All of these are widely shared with the family members of the initial immigrant, so most immigration being family-based does not invalidate this conclusion.

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It's hard to argue for nature when the immigrants come from among the most diverse ethnic groups. There is literally no homogeneity among them apart from the fact that their parents weren't American citizens.

I don't believe the assertion was that these genes are ethnogenetic. I find gp's assertion dubious as well, but I think you may have misunderstood it.

While I definitely buy the nurture side of that argument more than the nature side, it's still possible to be selecting for a set of genetic traits across a diverse group as long as those traits are distributed pretty evenly.

Much like a randomized controlled trial, the high-pass filters tend to render the nature-nurture argument a moot point. In fact, raising it mostly makes me worry about the more racist aspects of anthropology leaking into the discussion.

As far as I'm aware, there's no strong link between motivation and generics.

Or as Vincent said in Gattaca: "There is no gene for the human spirit."

it is a whole constellation of genetic, epi-genetic, environmental factors, and experiences in concert. to say that there is no genetic predisposition for behavior is... not confirmed by the science.

I don't know if "motivation" per se is studied in this context, but the genetic links for at least "self-regulation"[1], "self-control"[2], and "political ambition"[3] have been studied:

[1]https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000224

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

[3]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1

A lot of what "motivation" is comes from being able and healthy, and a lot of that certainly comes from genetics, I'd say. If my family's health history didn't prevent me from sleeping more than a few hours a night, I'd certainly be much, much more motivated. No idea how it translates in statistics.

As genetics leads to different body types, so does it lead to distinct individual cultures to adapt to genetically defined physiology. So genetics can directly inform culture that way.

The two are inextricably tied. How you think about yourself and your world is based on how you experience it, which is rooted in your genetics and how you were (and weren't) taught to experience it.

We at least learn to motivate ourselves based on how we're taught to do so through the cultures the people around us carry. If some of that is informed by genetics, then it's possible for you to learn to motivate yourself based on someone else's genetics.

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